Bruce Tift: Already Free

Summary

Faith Matters Podcast
Episode: Bruce Tift: Already Free
Date: February 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, hosts Aubrey Chavez, Tim, and a Faith Matters Co-host engage in a deep, wide-ranging conversation with Bruce Tift—psychotherapist, Vajrayana Buddhist practitioner, and author of Already Free. The dialogue explores the intersection of Western psychotherapy and Eastern contemplative practices, focusing on how we can make peace with our humanity by meeting discomfort with kindness, practicing embodied awareness, and revisiting the stories and survival strategies we developed as children. The conversation challenges common cultural paradigms of self-improvement and freedom, and offers a profoundly liberating perspective on personal growth, emotional healing, and spiritual life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Bruce Tift’s Journey: Combining Buddhism and Psychotherapy

(02:40 – 09:37)

• Bruce shares his background: growing up in a mostly areligious home, engaging with Unitarianism, dissatisfaction with clinical psychology’s rigid models, and finding resonance in Tibetan Buddhist practice and teaching.
• He explains that Western psychotherapy and Vajrayana Buddhism offer fundamentally different worldviews:
  • Western psychotherapy: Emphasizes self-improvement, resolving neuroses, and achieving “better” versions of oneself—rooted in a Platonic ideal-seeking tradition.
  • Buddhist view: Asserts there’s no objectively existing, permanent self to perfect. Freedom comes from open awareness, not from realizing some ideal or fixing our limitations.
• Memorable quote:
  • “Western culture doesn’t advocate for awareness as our most fundamental nature... Self improvement never leads to freedom. It’s a different path.” (Bruce Tift, 08:44)

2. Childhood Survival Strategies and Core Vulnerabilities

(09:37 – 17:33)

• Bruce explains that survival strategies form in childhood as adaptive responses to imperfect parental care and emotional environments. These strategies, though healthy for children, become maladaptive (or just outdated) in adulthood.
• He describes “core vulnerabilities”—the particular wounds or sensitivities we organize our lives around to avoid re-experiencing pain. As adults, we retain these childhood strategies until we consciously engage with them.
• Notable insights:
  • “A healthy response to a distorted emotional environment requires a distorted survival strategy… Nothing we do actually solves the issue but we’re trying our best to have a positive experience, feel safe, be loved.” (Bruce Tift, 13:12)
  • “Avoidance strategies… are not wrong. They’re just out of date, usually by decades.” (Bruce Tift, 15:08)
• The path to growth is voluntary exposure to these old vulnerabilities, using our adult intelligence and capacity for awareness.

3. An Embodied Practice: Working with Core Fears

(17:33 – 26:05)

• Tim volunteers his own vulnerability around money and security. Bruce demonstrates how to apply the theory:
  • Recognize: The issue is not about the surface concern (money), but about an underlying feeling (safety/insecurity).
  • Practice: “I give myself permission to feel unsafe and insecure off and on until I die.” Focus on physical sensations—tightness, nausea, etc.—without storytelling or attempts to fix.
• Bruce challenges the common desire to “solve” these feelings through action.
  • “Rest in not knowing as the ground of every second of your life… Why not make not knowing your ground?” (Bruce Tift, 26:05)
  • The work is not eradicating discomfort, but building tolerance and kindness toward it—eventually diminishing identification with the wounded self.

4. The Wave of Emotion and the Role of Understanding

(30:00 – 34:22)

• The hosts discuss how, under stress, we try to fix feelings by constructing “the truest story” about them. Bruce highlights that all humans share only a handful of physical states of arousal; the mind spins countless emotional labels in an effort to manage discomfort.
• Emotions arise, peak, and dissolve naturally, typically in 90 seconds—if left unprolonged by rumination.
  • “Immediate emotional reactivity is usually what gets us more into trouble. So you start there… ride this wave of panic and tolerate that panic.” (Bruce Tift, 32:07)
• Understanding the source of discomfort has its place, but only after first embodied, nonreactive presence.
  • Tip: Schedule intellectual processing, rather than defaulting to it in moments of overwhelm.

5. Separateness & Connection: The Spectrum of Intimacy

(34:32 – 40:36)

• Bruce unpacks the polarities of “masculine and feminine” energies—better framed as separateness vs. connection.
• Culturally, we idealize connection (especially in intimate relationships), but all relationships cycle between needs for closeness and individuality. Most couples unconsciously manufacture problems as a way to preserve separateness.
  • “The antidotal practice… is consciously reclaiming one’s own integrity, authenticity, the feeling of being your own person… I’m going to take care of myself.” (Bruce Tift, 38:36)
• Adult intimacy requires both self-care and care for the other—oscillating between the two, rather than fusion or chronic conflict.

6. Spiritual Traditions, Community, and “Packages of Disturbance”

(41:58 – 46:32)

• The hosts ask about the relationship between New Testament teachings (“turn the other cheek,” etc.) and individual needs for connection/separateness.
• Bruce notes that every religious tradition is interpreted through personal context. Mature spirituality involves holding teachings in open-hearted, authentic ways, not simply adopting community norms.
  • “If an individual wants to operate at higher levels of human potential, they have to be prepared to feel alone.” (Bruce Tift, 43:14)
• Disturbance is an inevitable part of human experience; the question is whether our “package of disturbance” aligns with our mature values or with old, childish ones.
  • “We pick a package of disturbance that’s in alignment with our values instead of… what fit probably our needs as young, dependent, immature little kids. Not wrong, just out of date.” (Bruce Tift, 44:33)

7. Cooperating with Life (Not Fixing It)

(45:09 – 46:32)

• The hosts reflect on “cooperating with your life” as opposed to seeing life itself as the problem. Bruce clarifies:
  • “We’re just an expression of life… The problem is our fantasy of alienation, as if we’re separate from life, makes it hard to feel like we’re going to cooperate or be supported by life because we think it’s opposed to us.” (Bruce Tift, 45:37)
  • Cooperation requires discipline and openness, not comfort or absence of vulnerability.

8. Freedom Revisited: Choosing vs. Awareness

(46:34 – 49:19)

• Tim relates this “package of disturbance” insight to personal freedom—choosing your difficulties.
• Bruce distinguishes between the Western ideal of freedom (choosing) and the Buddhist ideal (awareness):
  • “Instead of finding freedom at the level of making a choice, you could ask, well, what is it that’s aware of this experience of choice?... Openness accommodates choice making.” (Bruce Tift, 47:41)

9. Practical First Steps

(49:20 – 51:55)

• How can listeners begin this work?
  • Value your own tradition as yours; don’t merely rebel or seek “better” ones.
  • Recognize that the only place to intervene, experiment, or experience change is in immediacy—the embodied now.
  • Two enduring practices:
    • Embodied immediacy: Bring attention into current physical sensations and let experience be as it is.
    • Unconditional kindness: No matter what arises, treat yourself with kindness.
  • “Embodied immediacy, unconditional kindness, I think are very reliable personal opinion.” (Bruce Tift, 51:37)

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• “Self improvement never leads to freedom. It’s a different path.” — Bruce Tift (08:44)
• “Avoidance strategies… are not wrong. They’re just out of date, usually by decades.” — Bruce Tift (15:08)
• “I give myself permission to feel unsafe and insecure off and on until I die.” — Bruce Tift (20:57)
• “Rest in not knowing as the ground of every second of your life.” — Bruce Tift (26:05)
• “Immediate emotional reactivity is usually what gets us more into trouble. So you start there.” — Bruce Tift (32:07)
• “Almost all couples come with the fantasy that there’s a lack of connection. I think it’s exactly the opposite. I think there’s too much unconscious connection.” — Bruce Tift (37:45)
• “We pick a package of disturbance that’s in alignment with our values instead of… our immature little kid needs. Not wrong, just out of date.” — Bruce Tift (44:33)
• “We’re just an expression of life. The problem is our fantasy of alienation.” — Bruce Tift (45:37)
• “Embodied immediacy, unconditional kindness… are very reliable.” — Bruce Tift (51:37)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:40 – Origins: Bruce’s story and merging Buddhism with psychotherapy
• 09:37 – Core vulnerabilities and childhood survival strategies
• 17:33 – Navigating real-life vulnerability: Tim and Bruce’s demonstration
• 25:44 – What changes through the practice of embodied immediacy?
• 30:00 – Emotion as a wave: Biology, emotion, and the role of insight
• 34:32 – The spectrum of separateness and connection in relationships
• 41:58 – Interpreting religious/spiritual tradition through individuality
• 45:09 – “Cooperating with life”: Accepting disturbance, not fighting it
• 46:34 – The Buddhist view on freedom and the function of awareness
• 49:20 – Practical steps: Embodied immediacy and unconditional kindness

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers deep, compassionate insight for anyone wrestling with perfectionism, discomfort, or spiritual uncertainty. Bruce Tift’s blend of Buddhist and therapeutic wisdom provides a gentle but radical invitation: stop striving for an ideal self, and begin meeting the messy, unresolved reality of your own experience with curiosity, embodiment, and ongoing kindness.

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For further exploration:
Bruce Tift’s book, Already Free, is available wherever books are sold.

Transcript

[Book Club Host]

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[Aubrey Chavez]

Hey everybody, this is Aubrey Chavez from Faith Matters. Today we are so excited to share our conversation with Bruce Tift, author, psychotherapist, and longtime practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism. This summer, our friends at Uplift Kids introduced us to Bruce's fascinating book, Already Free, and we've been thinking about it ever since. In this conversation, Bruce dives into some of the ideas in the book. He explores how to make peace with being human and looks at two seemingly opposing paths, both Western and Eastern wisdom. He shows how each offers a vital piece of the puzzle. Where psychotherapy may teach us to bring our early wounds and disowned emotions into awareness, Buddhist practices help us recognize the deeper freedom that's available when we stop identifying with a fixed self. We love that Bruce talked us through the ways that we organize around our core fears and why many of our childhood survival strategies still run the show in adulth, and why real freedom often begins with simply allowing ourselves to feel uncomfortable without trying to fix or escape. Bruce's insights feel so useful for navigating seasons of growth, whether emotional, spiritual, or relational. And this conversation really helped us see that personal growth isn't about achieving some ideal version of ourselves. It's about meeting our actual experience with curiosity, compassion, and presence. We found Bruce's wisdom to be gentle, honest, and so deeply liberating, and we are so grateful that he joined us today. We hope that you enjoy this conversation.

[Tim]

Well, Bruce, thank you so much for joining us. It's an honor to have you here My pleasure.

[Bruce Tift]

Thanks for the invitation.

[Tim]

Of course. Yeah. We absolutely loved your book. It was so resonant for us in so many ways. Would you mind maybe just getting us started by talking about how this fusion of Buddhist ideas and therapeutic practice came to be something that you were exploring?

[Bruce Tift]

Well, our histories are so complex and mysterious, and they're always. We're always practicing revisionism as far as how we got to where we're at. Yeah. But having said that, I grew up with my parents, sort of mostly a religious. But my mom wanted us to have something, so we. She took us to a Unitarian church. And that's the environment as far as religion, but I don't know if you know. But Unitarianism, especially back east, we would study crystals and go to mosques and stuff like that. So that started a long time ago. I started a graduate program in clinical psychology in the late 60s and was really unhappy with their model of sort of a scientist who knew the objective truth. And if you were a client, you were by definition neurotic, that sort of bias. And so I came back to my interest in psychology, psychotherapy through my exposure to the Tibetan Buddhist community, mostly when I was traveling in my mid-20s. And then I came back connecting with my teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, who's in the Vajrayan, or Tibetan tradition. I found that therapy was very helpful for me and Buddhist practice was very helpful. So I got a master's in Boulder, Colorado, from Naropa University, and the master's was in Buddhist and Western psychology. But I never. I never found anything sort of at the heart of either of those approaches that could be, for me, anyway, integrated. And as I respected that experience, I found that it was, for me, a very rich unfolding that became more and more interesting. It went to more depth. I thought it was more helpful for me and hopefully people I work with, training ourselves to tolerate holding contradictory experience, views, emotions at all times with no fantasy of resolution ever. I would say that psychotherapy is an expression of a Western culture, and Western culture doesn't advocate for awareness as our most fundamental nature. Starting back with probably Plato, 2500 years ago or so, there was a sense that there was an ideal form that actually had an objective existence. Starting off with clarity, that something like a triangle, the right angle triangle, has a perfect form to it, but you can never draw a perfect triangle. And so that's sort of a metaphor for the view that whatever we do is an imperfect expression of something that has an a objectively real, more complete, maybe free nature, just like in Western culture in general, most religions think in some way or another as humans, as sort of imperfect expressions of what's holy. You know, it's in our culture. Buddhism does not share that view. At least in Vajrayana Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, the assertion is that we're never going to actually find an objectively existing permanent self. You might see a rainbow and it would be a little strange to say, I don't see a rainbow. That's what we call it. But it would also be a little strange upon investigation to think there was actually an objective rainbow up in the sky. It was completely relational. So that's sort of closer to a Buddhist view. So in the west, our idea of freedom is to have no limitations, to be able to do what I want, have enough money or health or education or good circumstances, or be able to travel, to have the life you want. And we sort of think of that as freedom. From a Buddhist point of view, it's almost the opposite, which is that the view is that as relative vivid appearance were just a collection of limitations, anything that the three of us could do or anybody else is probably 100,000th of the options that we could be doing. And we're never going to do them. We're certainly not at the same moment. So a Buddhist view is more that, strangely enough, we commit to the experience of being profoundly limited. What's always there is awareness. And so we could think of freedom as a conscious participation in open awareness. And because it's open, it has no ascribable qualities, no bias, no agenda. We're just as open to feeling healthy as we are open to dying. And so that's another understanding of freedom. Whereas in our culture most of our goals are seen as steps that we hope will lead toward greater freedom. Yeah, I'm going to get more money, then I'll be more free. I'm going to, you know, have kids and then I'll be fulfilled. Or if we're in a faith based sort of world, if I follow this faith, I'll get my reward in whatever eternal realm that faith may offer. Psychotherapy doesn't really advocate for freedom. It advocates for self improvement, which is very valuable. But in my opinion, self improvement never leads to freedom. It's a different path. It just, it's improving the display.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

It feels like the what, what maybe both, both approaches have in common is that we get deeply disturbed and we start looking for solutions and answers. And, and, and you write about the way our lives often start revolving around the things that we are most afraid of. We and we, we get obsessive about avoiding these things. And then, and, and that when we start recognizing what those core fears are, we will see that like so much of our energy is getting poured into, to calculating our lives to make sure that we never have to experience those, those feelings. And so I wondered if you could just talk about that concept of core vulnerabilities and how they develop in the first place.

[Bruce Tift]

Yeah, I find it helpful first of all to consider trying on for size the idea that every second of my life, anything I do, is basically an effort to take the very best care of myself possible. That doesn't mean it's skillful or accurate because we can base our efforts of self care on things that are inaccurate, hallucinatory, socially conditioned. But I think I see that as the fundamental motivation. So I would see that in a very intelligent, healthy, appropriate, creative way as little dependent, immature beings when we're very young, that we're all trying to do the very best we can. And I think it's pretty safe to speculate that all of us have immature parents. You know, it's just a matter of degree, in detail. And so that means that as open little beings, there's aspects of who we are that are not going to be welcome and will even get us in trouble. If you're growing up with a depressed mother, you might find that it's not very smart to feel dependent because that parent is always self absorbed. If you're growing up with a rageaholic father just to be gender stereotypic, it's possible that it's not very smart to show your anger because you'll get overwhelmed and attacked and terrified. But a healthy response to a distorted emotional environment requires a distorted survival strategy. If I find it unsafe and it comes from actual experience, we're not born this way, you know, things actually happen. If I find it's not smart to have aggressive energy to say no, to be angry, to say I hate you, then the smart thing to do for me as a little kid is to compartmentalize, repress, dissociate from any feelings of anger. Because little kids, I don't think can discriminate between feelings and behavior. Most adults can't even, but certainly not little kids. And so the smart thing to fit into that family would be, I'm not going to be an angry little kid. It's not pathological. It's very healthy to have the most love and approval and avoid the most attack and abandonment as possible. But in a more complicated way, nothing we do actually solves the issue but we're trying our best to have a positive experience, feel safe, be loved. But nothing we do is going to solve our parents limitations. So we come up with these patterns and because they work, they get carried into adulthood. And because they're about survival, certainly emotional survival, and for some people, unfortunately, even physical survival, we tend not to mess with survival strategies if they're working. And, and so the more difficult our childhood usually the more rigid our survival strategies. If somebody is fortunate and grows up in a very relatively mature family, then they have the luxury of participating in more openness and continually investigating, oh, how is this working? Oh, what could I do different? Oh, I made a mistake. Oh, it's, you know, my parents are irritated. No, not the end of the world. Now they're giving me a hug. And, and so the more safe we feel as little kids, the more empathy, the more touch, the more holding. We tend to come into adulthood with less identification with these survival strategies and more ability to experiment. But we've got to work with what we've got. So as you were saying, I think one way to think about it is that out of our own health we learn to organize our life to never go into those especially emotional issues, feelings that for very real reasons were very unwise for us to allow ourselves to feel and therefore act on as little kids. And the problem is that we have a lot of capacities as adults that we didn't have as kid. And most of us can tolerate a hundred times more intensity and range of emotions. So almost everybody, if they start looking, are going to find that these avoidance strategies, which is just another word for neurosis, are not wrong. They're just out of date, usually by decades. But the only way to bring ourself up to date, unfortunately, is not just intellectually. We might start there, but voluntarily, to take ourself into exactly those disturbing vulnerabilities that we've organized our life around. Avoidancy. Well, okay, feels like I'm going to die. My body's saying we're going to die, we're going to die, we're going to die. Get us out of here. Yeah, that's true. That's not going to change. But we bring our adult critical intelligence and life experience into relationship. Our evolutionary biology says better safe than sorry. You know, negativity bias of the brain. So we bring our current adult critical intelligence into intimate engagement with our biology, our family of origin experience, our gender training, cultural training, all of that stuff. Not to resolve it, but just to hold them in relationship and for ourself over and over and over and over again, we have to train ourselves to stay embodied, even if it's just for a few seconds at first. And see, does that panic harm me? At the heart of anxiety, I think, is formless panic over maybe thousands of times. If we never find any actual harm, we might start to be willing to commit to having an intimate, embodied, kind relationship with those historically disowned feelings. And it's possible that having access to a wider range of who we already are might result in a more skillful engagement with our life.

[Tim]

That's really helpful. And I wonder, Bruce, if you wouldn't mind, could you walk us through. So we've got the theory, I think, of sort of like the. The chain of events, starting with corner core vulnerabilities, and then it leads all the way to this practice of embodied immediacy. Right. Is there any chance you could do. And I know it's so nuanced, so it's difficult to do, but, like, let's say someone comes into your office.

[Bruce Tift]

Well, if. If you. If you care to. You don't. You can pass. Why not come up with one of your vulnerabilities? Oh, sure, we could do that.

[Tim]

Yes. That's a good idea.

[Bruce Tift]

You can talk about Aubry's vulnerabilities.

[Tim]

Oh, yeah, let's talk about Aubrey. That's a really good idea. This is an interesting one, I think. Well, let's. Yeah, let's. Let's work with one. And I have many. But of course, one that comes. One that comes to mind right now is that, I mean, the. The example that you use of. Of wanting more money to have more freedom. That definitely resonates with me. I think, you know, I work really hard. I spend and half spend, arguably too much time at work over the past couple of. Couple of decades. I think part of it is this desire to have some future amount of freedom that I don't currently have. There's also another part of another part of it that says, like, I'll finally be secure. Like, once I have, you know, X number of dollars in the bank account, like, I won't need to. I won't need to worry anymore. I'll be. I'll be totally secure. So do you want to do very American. Yeah, it is a very American view. Absolutely. Would you want to. Would you want to start with that one and see where we get?

[Bruce Tift]

Sure. Well, often if somebody's done some personal work, I'll just ask if they think that that's been a lifelong issue or do they think it's only as an adult or do they think it's only since they got together with their partner or some have kids? I mean, does this seem like it's lifelong or is it situational?

[Tim]

That's a great question. I think the idea that the world is a somewhat scary place and I'd like to secure my position in it more fully is lifelong.

[Bruce Tift]

Yeah. And obviously if somebody comes out of a sense of the world is not safe or scarcity is often a, you know, a way of addressing that, then that the, the deeper issue is not money. It's just going to get attached to endless circumstances as the person goes through their life. Maybe they're a millionaire or nowadays, you know, 10 millionaire or something. But that's unlikely to make their issue around lack of safety go away. Yeah. Symptom relief, but probably not go away. So then if it looks like that it might resonate that the issue is not money, but feeling I want to be safe, I want security, then I would just suggest that why would we make such a project out of getting something unless you felt insecure, Unless you already felt unsafe. Yep. And if that resonates, then I might suggest a sentence just to bring things out a little more like I give myself permission to feel unsafe and insecure off and on until I die. And then just maybe stop. No interpretation, no commentary. Just allow attention to sort of drop or bring your attention to sensation level experience in this present moment. No commentary. You're not trying to understand it or heal it or anything. Like as if, you know, my stomach's tight, my heart is beating fast or I feel numb, it's fine. There isn't a correct range of sensations. It's just bringing attention out of my story into a mediated, embodied, non interpretive experience. And just hang out with it for a little while and see for yourself, you know.

[Tim]

Yeah. The, the place that I always feel it is in my. Almost always centered in my stomach. There's sort of a, there is a tightness but also like a little bit of a queasiness and a, and a. And I would say like a muscular weakness in my extremities also accompanies it as well.

[Bruce Tift]

So it's possible that that very biological response is in the fight flight freeze response. It might be sort of the freeze collapse or something of a flight response. And you'll probably find that in a wide range of life experiences whenever you have that feeling of feeling unsafe being triggered. But if you're. You seem like a bright guy. So as you're growing up it would be just Smart of you to find ways to distract yourself, as we were saying a little earlier, from the fact I already feel unsafe. I felt unsafe off and on already all my life. Well, that sucks. I don't like that. So I think I'll just come up with a project that'll never work, but it's a distraction and it promises sometime in the future I will feel safe. And if you're an American, it might be earning money. If it were some other culture, it might be accumulating merit or serving your community. You know, it could be anything. But you could imagine that maybe working too much is in an unexamined way. The best way that you came up with for self care was probably a distraction where you learned to have the project of achievement and accomplishment with the fantasy of future feelings of safety and security. Of course, however old you are right now, so far it hasn't worked or we wouldn't be having this discussion. Right? So where's the evidence? You know, it's going to work in the next 30 or 40 years or something, right? So, and then, then if you, from a more western point of view, you could look back and say, well, did I spend my childhood trying to accomplish and be productive and get the secondary gain from my family and then my school and then my community that comes with putting a lot of energy into work. So it's not pathological, it's just that now if you were to investigate, you may find that that strategy of self care might be a few decades out of date. But the only way you're really going to find that out is if you're willing to do what you just did and go into immediate experience. That's where you'll only place you'll get information about this contrast between conditioning and spontaneous experience. Every time you do it, you check it out. Is this panic I feel actually a signal that I'm going to be harmed if I let myself feel afraid.

[Tim]

So the way I've, the way that I've understood this so far is I've noticed something about myself, some way that I'm approaching the world. And then I've asked myself, is this a response to some project that I've been engaged in in a lifelong way that has, that has emerged from some vulnerability that I have. I've then leaned into the vulnerability itself. I've, I've noticed what happens in my body when I, when I sit with that, that vulnerability. That's been the practice as I've understood it so far. Let's, let's say that I, I Do that over and over. Let's say I do it 10 times today and I do it, you know, 70 times this week. What, what am I going to expect to happen over the course of, of engaging in that practice over the coming months and years?

[Bruce Tift]

Well, in your immediate experience, you rest in not knowing otherwise, you're just going to make this practice into your current project.

[Tim]

Yes, that makes sense.

[Bruce Tift]

Aren't you telling me, Bruce, that if I do this, then I'll finally start feeling spiritual safety and security? Yes.

[Tim]

Yeah, that's what I'm, that's what I'm asking. Yeah.

[Bruce Tift]

Why not rest in not knowing as the ground of every second of your life? I mean, what do you know that's important? Do you know the best way to have an intimate relationship, the best way to be a parent if you have kids? Do you know if all of your effort at security is going to, you'll be able to enjoy it knowing that you're going to be alive when you're 70? Do you know who you are? Why not make not knowing your ground? It doesn't mean give up the relative display like your lds. It would seem sort of stupid to me to say, oh, if, if I'm introduced to these ideas of transparency, of experiencing, that invalidates the Mormon view and I should give it up. No, I, I, that's missing the point. I think it's more like, hey, this has been a good vehicle for me. I'm going to practice holding my Mormon faith in the environment of not knowing or openness, and allow things to unfold as they will. I don't have to give it up. I'm going to hold it in open awareness. And then moment by moment, it's likely that I will bring my faith into more and more alignment with my own authenticity and integrity. You can't push away aspects of who you are without ending up feeling that you're divided. May not be real conscious, but you know, in our culture, everybody unfortunately sort of ends up with some version of feeling like a being a problematic person, and then they try to solve it based on a current set of life circumstances, rather than going beneath and saying, well, maybe I'm pretending to be divided against myself as a strategy for not having to feel aspects of my experience that really feel scary and overwhelming and dangerous. So it's possible that you might start feeling more present, less divided, less problematic. You might start feeling a little more clarity, less self absorption, because all these things end up basically serving a very primitive form of protection from an unsafe world of self absorption. It's like the turtle pulling their head in the shell, which is not wrong, it's not neurotic. It's just as humans, we have our memory and our concepts which carry information over time. So we're going to keep our head in the shell for days because we remember what happened. A turtle, little time passes and it's instinct, say, you know, stick your head out again. So, so we tend to embed our young survival strategies in ways that persist unless they're challenged. But the price tag of reducing unnecessary suffering is to commit to having an embodied, intimate, kind relationship with the actual pain, the actual fear that we carry as humans that are vulnerabilities. And so if you have stayed with these sensations and at that moment don't find any evidence of harm or damage, then you could practice being kind to these sensations. You're not trying to heal them, accomplish anything. You just be kind because that's what's true at the moment. And then as a more intellectual attitude, commit to practicing owning these difficult feelings as a valid part of your life. But because they're negative, understand it's going to have to be a discipline, probably. I can't wait until I'm in the mood.

[Tim]

Thank you.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

For me, this was the most fascinating part of the book. I think that's when I was like, okay, Tim, you have to, you have to read this too, because you need to get fixed. It's one of those things that felt like some deep part of me understood that this was, that this is what I needed right now. And, and I, there's a part where you talk about how across the globe there are really only six or seven states of arousal that all humans share that you can, that everyone can feel in their body. And then we have just this endless list of emotions that we, that we use to label these same states of arousal. And so, and that to me, I think has been the natural place that I go when I am feeling something very uncomfortable. Like I, I, I feel like if I can just find the truest story, then I'll feel relieved because I'll have a, there will be some path forward, like I'll be able to fix it for next time. But you write about how this, these, it's energy that like you really feel these emotions in a wave. And like if you can sit with the wave, it sort of has this quality of coming and going without. Not because you figured it out, that's just the nature of the thing. But I, I still wanted to ask you there a place for, for digging in and explaining to Yourself why you felt it in the first place or is that always going to kick the can down the road?

[Bruce Tift]

No. First of all, you could watch for tendencies of black and white, all or nothing organization. When you say, is it this or that?

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Yes. Okay.

[Bruce Tift]

It's possible it's a little more complex, but you may have a, a style having grown up learning. Oh, I can take care of myself best by understanding maybe not by going out and achieving like, you know, maybe.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

[Bruce Tift]

And so when you feel disturbed, maybe your go to self care is to try to figure it out and understand.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Yeah.

[Bruce Tift]

You know, so.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Oh, that's interesting. That is. Yeah, I think that is exactly what I think. That's exactly what I do.

[Bruce Tift]

It doesn't mean Kim should quit his job. It doesn't mean you should give up understanding. It's a great capacity. But you just want to tease apart your emotional experience from your conceptual intellectual investigations. And immediate emotional reactivity is usually what gets us more into trouble. So you start there.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Yeah.

[Bruce Tift]

And that's where that idea of the wave comes in. It's like in Buddhism the jargon is arise, dwell, fall away. But the life of an emotion in the brain is about 90 seconds. There's no such thing as a permanent emotion that anybody's found. So part of our work is to ride this wave of panic and tolerate that panic. And one way to do it is by staying at the sensation level and really being honest and say, well, where's the harm, where's the damage? Another way of saying it is that the amygdala as the threat sensor. Yeah. Seems to operate about 13 or 14 times faster than the cortex, which is a later evolutionary capacity. So we get triggered and we're into fight flight, freeze a fraction of a second. And so if we act on that, we're going to be acting basically at the level of survival. If we can tolerate hanging in our bodies with that panicky feeling, then we can wait a little while until the panic subsides. Then that might be when our cortex gets back online or when we regain access to our adult capacities or we start to have choice and not run by emotional reactive energy. And then one of our choices could be, well, gosh, I really want to understand more about where this comes from. And so, so today at 2:00, I'm going to give myself a half hour to think about it. And it's helpful in thinking around sensitive issues. I find to actually have a bit of a structure about when I'm going to do it and for how long is Sort of a little bit mild protection, because then I'm not waiting until I'm reactive to do my thinking.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. That's so interesting. Tim, I really want to ask about masculine and feminine, but go if you want to not go there yet. Okay.

[Tim]

That's great.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Okay. My. My second favorite part of the book is where you. You really explore this. This spectrum of connecting and separation and. And the masculine and the feminine. And this was really interesting to me because I. I really identified with this. This, like, connecting energy. And there was this one part, I think you're maybe talking about somebody, or maybe it wasn't even a specific couple, but often when a couple comes to you, usually I think like two thirds of the time you say it will be the wife who says, I want to feel more connected. And. And they're kind of. That's the problem they're putting on the table for you. And so you talk about how very often what's actually needed is for the. The woman who feels like she needs more connection is to act. She. What she actually needs is some more separation. But it's like. But. And so I. I was so. I was so intrigued by this idea that there is this healthy push and pull and that when either the masculine or the feminine is unchecked, it becomes neurotic. And so I. I'd love for you to just talk about that spectrum and how you see. See it play out in partnership, but also just in individuals who maybe lean toward one end of the spectrum or the other.

[Bruce Tift]

Sure. And maybe I should say for any of your listeners who don't like that language of masculine and feminine, that's. The language isn't the point. It's just that most cultures seem to use some version of that. But we could just say separateness and connection, too. But because you're comfortable with that, I'll just use that. So you can't be a life form without both. You can't be a life form without a shell or skin or a membrane without competing for resources and protecting yourself. Separateness. You can't be a life form without being completely interconnected with your physical environment, biological environment, social environment, other people. You can't. You can't survive if you were all on your own. But in our culture, we tend to be told and taught that intimacy is synonymous with closeness and connection. So if somebody says, I want to be intimate with that person, they usually mean, I want to be close and connected. And it's not an examined norm in our culture, but it's not one I agree with. I would say out of, I don't know, five to 10,000 couples over 45 years, maybe a handful of people have come into therapy wanting help with being more separate. Almost all believe they need help and being more connected. But I think that is really problematic because if it's true that you need both and there's no resolution between the two, then most couples end up making sure that they recover their sense of self, get their own private needs met, have a little breathing room, get some escape from emotional fusion and claustrophobia by having problems. And most couples actually ritualize their relationship unconsciously with often a variety of things. One is miscommunication. And then lack of sexuality is pretty widespread because sexuality is such a connecting energy that if a couple is very enmeshed or emotionally fused or codependent, then the last thing they need is more connection. Most couples agree to have problems that aren't really that complicated, but they're agreeing not to solve the problems because it gives them another way of recovering some separateness because they're not willing to do it consciously. Almost all couples come with the fantasy that there's a lack of connection. I think it's exactly the opposite. I think there's too much unconscious connection. And the antidotal practice at first anyway, is consciously reclaiming one's own integrity, authenticity, the feeling of being your own person. Hey, I'm going to take care of myself. You could be you, and I'll be affected by it, but I don't have to keep putting pressure on you to be who I want you to be. And I'm not going to be available for you to tell me I'm doing it wrong. Hey, we'll have conflict off and on. Yeah. You know, we already have it. We're just pretending it's these ritualized versions of it.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Yeah. So is that what it looks like? That it just needs to. If it becomes more conscious, do we do that with less suffering?

[Bruce Tift]

Yes, I think less unnecessary suffering, it's more vulnerable, but it's also more intimate.

[Book Club Host]

Yeah.

[Bruce Tift]

Having these ritualized ways to make sure basically that we can handle our disturbance privately is actually an avoidance of greater adult intimacy, because intimacy is inherently disturbing. It's riding a bike. You stay upright. By cooperating with always being out of balance, you never achieve uprightness. You never achieve intimacy. Yeah. If you're parents, you never achieve parenting. You know, you have to alternate between being kind to the kid and frustrating their, you know, inappropriate behavior. If you're in a partnership, you have to alternate between self care and care for your partner. And over time and with practice these swings, we can catch more and more quickly so there's less anxiety put into the system. But the price tag is personal responsibility as half of adult intimacy.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Yeah, yeah. So much more vulnerable that that is. I, I, I just really appreciated that. It also made me really want to ask you what you think. I mean, this has been my experience too also. I think that I think a lot of my, when we first got married, like that, that's really what I needed is to develop this some separateness, like to figure out and have enough of the self that I could actually express it, like recognize my own, like what I, what I liked and wanted and didn't want and needed and like that, that was, that didn't feel very natural to me. And so I, I was so curious to know what you think about then, about the, the New Testament generally and Jesus's messages, because this is, this was something that I felt like I was kind of bumping into. I felt like the, the spiritual training I was getting looked like going the extra mile and turning your cheek and like it. To me it felt when I was reading this section, I thought, like, is that, was that the issue? That, are those messages really for the neurotic masculine? And I was taking these in for in a, in and I already had, I was already suffering for being imbalanced. So I guess that's my question. Like is, is that medicine for the masculine and, and where is the wisdom for the feminine?

[Bruce Tift]

Yeah, well, like I said, I grew up Unitarian, but from the outside it seems like the Bible. It seems like an expression that came out of incredibly complex efforts to find some guidance to be decent people and to not get stuck at low levels of experiencing, to integrate a more open sacredness into daily life. I think again, we can be responsible for the fact that we're always interpreting, in this case our religion through our own personal understanding. Even if we take it literally, that's our call. Nobody can force us to have understanding.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Yeah.

[Bruce Tift]

And so that's my work to do, to find the aspect of that tradition that supports my open heartedness, my personal dignity and authenticity, my ability to become compassionate to others without being a victim. The ability to operate in society without taking society's norms as if they're a great guideline. Because society is very primitive actually. You know, so it's not to make any tradition wrong. It's just if an individual wants to operate at higher levels of human potential, they have to be prepared to feel alone.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

I think the follow up Question I'm dying to ask is, like, is that good work? Like, is it useful to be in a community where you are and in partnership where you will necessarily be disturbed?

[Bruce Tift]

You can't be a human and not be disturbed every day of your life. Once we really understand, especially because we have contradictory feelings. You want to be part of a community. There's been some very valuable parts there you feel seen, connected with. You're not homeless emotionally, and there are. Any community, any cultural organization is limited. There's always going to be contradictory feelings. If you stay in the community, you'll be disturbed. If you leave the community, you'll be disturbed. If you stay married, you're going to be disturbed. If you get a divorce, you'll be disturbed. There's no way around it. Every day of our life, we're going to be disturbed because we're sensitive, vulnerable life forms. But we can gradually bring our thinking behavior into more and more and more alignment with what we believe to be what's most important, our highest priority, our greatest values. And we. Then we pick a package of disturbance that's in alignment with our values instead of going with a package of disturbance that fit probably our needs as young, dependent, immature little kids. Not wrong, just out of date.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that's. I love the way you said that. And is that kind of what you mean by cooperating with your life? That's something that comes up a few times in the book. And I. That's a phrase that has stayed with me. I think the impulse is always to believe that your life is the problem. As soon as you can take care of life, then you'll. Then something will be fixed. And I love the idea that we can actually cooperate with the disturbance itself.

[Bruce Tift]

Yeah, it makes sense to me to investigate the view that we're just an expression of life. The problem is our fantasy of alienation, as if we're separate from life, makes it hard to feel like we're going to cooperate or be supported by life because we think it's opposed to us. So we're going to avoid vulnerability. We're going to avoid openness. And so that's why discipline is usually required, because we can't wait until it's comfortable. It's never going to be comfortable. But if we do that work, it's possible that as we start to actually sense less alienation from life and more cooperation with life, we experience life cooperating with us more.

[Tim]

Thank you so much, Bruce. I do want to ask you one more. One more question.

[Bruce Tift]

When you.

[Tim]

So when you Say that we're going to choose a package of disturbance one way or the other. That resonates deeply. And it seems to align to me with the idea that we're fundamentally free. You know, we're going to choose. We're going to choose one thing or another.

[Bruce Tift]

And you're equating freedom with choosing. But the freedom that I'm trying to express from a Vajrayana point of view is here are these two choices. And instead of finding freedom at the level of making a choice, you could ask, well, what is it that's aware of this experience of choice? What is aware of my feeling? What's aware. What's aware of my anger? What's aware of my sadness? What's aware of my not knowing? So there's always a return to personal experience, to experiential openness. Not conceptual openness, but experiential open. And openness by definition accommodates everything. So openness doesn't make choices, but openness accommodates choice making.

[Tim]

That's. That's, that's a helpful clarification.

[Bruce Tift]

Okay.

[Tim]

I am curious though, if and understood that you're saying we could choose the package of disturbance that aligns with our values. I am curious, though, would you advocate potentially in a subjective way, you know, Bruce Tiffs say about this.

[Bruce Tift]

Yeah. You're learning how to not get jumped.

[Tim]

I am not. Yes, I learned over the course of an hour.

[Bruce Tift]

That's good for people.

[Tim]

Going back to this question of intimacy, do you think that generally it's a positive thing for people to choose the package of disturbance that goes along with being an intimate relationship or with. Or that goes along with being in community as opposed to the package of disturbance that comes from isolation?

[Bruce Tift]

In either of those cases, I think is. Is a valid sort of inquiry, but I don't think it gets to the heart of things. That's not the level of the issue. The level is, am I using moment by moment by moment by moment experiencing as a vehicle for waking up or bringing myself into relationship with the sacred? However you all might say it in your tradition, we start off by being identified with our feelings and our experience. Then we move toward having our feelings rather than being our feelings. And then from a Buddhist point of view, we move toward an experience of transparency of feelings. So whatever experiences coming up, we're not identified with it. So we don't get stopped there. Resonate or.

[Tim]

Yeah.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Yes. And is that the. Just to close this loop for somebody who's feeling like this? This really is resonating or in, you know, Intriguing in a way that feels like this, this is something you want to learn more about. What, what can we, I mean, what, what's the first thing to start doing? Is it, is it just about becoming more embodied?

[Bruce Tift]

I think, I think that a good first step would be for somebody to value their tradition, whatever it is, on their terms and say, I'm going to make this tradition mine and I'll see how far I can go. I'm not going to learn, you know, Swahili because it's more exotic or hey, it doesn't have the limitations of English. Nobody is English. I'm going to use being an American. If you go to another country, you find out I'm an American, I don't get to be French or Indian. So I'm going to see how can I appreciate my experience and not think I have to be in a state of rebellion against low level interpretations. And I think it's pretty clear if you look that we're only living in the present moment ever. The immediate moment is the only location which our patterns of experience are arising.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Yeah.

[Bruce Tift]

Immediacy is the only location in which we can intervene in those patterns. Immediacy is the only location in which we can assess the value of our experiments. Then I think it's pretty reliable to train herself into immediacy. And my bias is embodied immediacy sensations like, you know, tight nausea in the stomach are just immediate. They don't have any interpretive, inherent interpretive nature. So the more we practice embodied immediacy, we'll just probably engage with whatever we choose to do more skillfully. And the more we can cultivate a practice of unconditional kindness, then at some point we might actually start experiencing ourselves as the activity of kindness itself because that's what we're doing regardless of what's coming and going. And that seems to be helpful for most people who experience that. So embodied immediacy, unconditional kindness, I think are very reliable personal opinion.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Bruce, thank you so much. This is really such a gift and I can't recommend your book enough, but I really am so grateful you do this conversation with us. This is incredibly helpful.

[Bruce Tift]

Well, thanks for inviting me.

[Faith Matters Co-host]

Absolutely. Thank you.

[Tim]

Thanks again, Bruce.

[Bruce Tift]

Thank you.

[Aubrey Chavez]

All right, thanks so much for listening. We really hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Bruce Tift. You can find his book already free wherever you books are sold and if faith matters, content is resonating with you and you get the chance. We would love for you to rate and review the podcast wherever you listen. Thanks again for listening.